John Wilkin
Rutgers University-New Brunswick, NJ·Earth & Environmental Science
Between the Pacific and Indian Oceans, warm Pacific water squeezes through the straits and inner seas of Indonesia. This flow is called the Indonesian Throughflow (ITF).
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Physics
- Topics
Indonesian Throughflow
physical oceanography
ocean circulation
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2027
What they work on
- Measure water mass and transport variability at the same time in the inflow and outflow straits of the Indonesian Throughflow, using a 3-year mooring array run jointly with China and Indonesia.
- Quantify tide-driven mixing and water mass transformation in the Indonesian inner seas using turbulence dissipation, fine-scale shear, profiling float and ship-based hydrography measurements.
- Use high-resolution, tide-resolving, nested ocean simulations and diagnostic tools to identify what drives flow and pathway variability and what controls heat and freshwater export and sea surface temperature.
- Investigate how remotely generated wind-driven waves and local internal tides interact with the throughflow, and help explain the shift in the Indo-Pacific system seen since 2006.
More about the research
Along the way, the water is cooled and freshened into a distinctive water mass that can be traced across the Indian Ocean and beyond. Mixing driven by tides helps reshape this water. That mixing affects regional upwelling, the rise of deep water toward the surface, and sea surface temperature (SST) patterns that influence global climate. Scientists still know little about how the throughflow, ocean waves arriving from far away, and locally generated internal tides interact. Internal tides are waves that travel inside the ocean along layers of different density. The region's overall circulation has also shifted since about 2006, for reasons that remain unexplained.
Why it matters
Better measurements of transport and mixing in the Indonesian Seas could improve the global ocean and climate models used for forecasts, since this region links the tropical Pacific to the global ocean circulation. The float deployments may also lay the groundwork for an ongoing regional Argo array and strengthen Indonesia's own ocean-observing capacity.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Raden Susanto
University of Maryland, MD·Earth & Environmental Science
Measure full-depth variability of Indonesian Throughflow transport, and its heat and freshwater fluxes, in the Makassar, Lombok and Alas Straits on tidal, intraseasonal and seasonal timescales using TRIUMPH mooring data.
Weiqing Han
University of Colorado Boulder, CO·Earth & Environmental Science
Characterize the spatial and temporal structure of a proposed new pathway carrying Indonesian Throughflow (ITF) waters across the South Indian Ocean, using mooring, drifter, satellite and reanalysis data.
James Moum
Oregon State University, OR·Earth & Environmental Science
Test whether tropical instability waves in the equatorial Pacific radiate internal waves downward and reshape the internal wave field, using moorings, a fastCTD, the Epsilometer turbulence profiler and WireWalker drifting profilers.
The school
Rutgers University-New Brunswick: 57 labs on PI Pages, $837M a year on research, 713 research doctorates a year.
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